Comments on: Dick and Jane Revisit the Reading Wars http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/dick-and-jane-revisit-the-reading-wars/ Teaching resources to differentiate instruction. Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:38:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: Sandra Fulton http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/dick-and-jane-revisit-the-reading-wars/comment-page-1/#comment-8618 Sandra Fulton Sun, 03 Oct 2010 02:26:52 +0000 http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/?p=856#comment-8618 Re: The "Cambridge University Reading Test" ... yes, it's bogus, and the message that "the human mind doesn't read every letter by itself" is a blanket generalization that doesn't hold across reading contexts. But neither does your claim that the test "actually points to the fact that readers really do look at all of the letters and apply the alphabetic code to read efficiently." The phenomenon illustrated by the "test" is called the Reicher-Wheeler effect. It demonstrates the role of top-down cognitive processes at work during reading. Of course, the closer the misspelled word is to the standard (familiar) spelling, the less effort it takes to decode. When then first and last letters are intact, it's even easier. This is because words have overall contours, not just features, and get processed by both sides of the brain (not just the left). When reading becomes automatic, and comprehension is the goal, readers often don't even notice when the surface code is inconsistent with what they are accustomed to seeing. It may be true, in the case of the "test", that comprehension is improved by the position of the consonants. But readers can use any number of strategies to decode text at the word level - only one of which involves bottom-up processes (i.e., "looking at all the letters and applying the alphabetic code.") Re: The “Cambridge University Reading Test” … yes, it’s bogus, and the message that “the human mind doesn’t read every letter by itself” is a blanket generalization that doesn’t hold across reading contexts. But neither does your claim that the test “actually points to the fact that readers really do look at all of the letters and apply the alphabetic code to read efficiently.”

The phenomenon illustrated by the “test” is called the Reicher-Wheeler effect. It demonstrates the role of top-down cognitive processes at work during reading. Of course, the closer the misspelled word is to the standard (familiar) spelling, the less effort it takes to decode. When then first and last letters are intact, it’s even easier. This is because words have overall contours, not just features, and get processed by both sides of the brain (not just the left). When reading becomes automatic, and comprehension is the goal, readers often don’t even notice when the surface code is inconsistent with what they are accustomed to seeing.

It may be true, in the case of the “test”, that comprehension is improved by the position of the consonants. But readers can use any number of strategies to decode text at the word level – only one of which involves bottom-up processes (i.e., “looking at all the letters and applying the alphabetic code.”)

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